Hearing instruments, such as hearing aids, earbuds, headphones and speakers, are often designed to receive wireless signals from other electronic devices. For example, hearing aids may wirelessly receive audio signals from televisions to improve the viewing experience for the hearing-impaired. Similarly, earbuds may wirelessly communicate with a mobile phone to stream music files stored on the phone.
Such hearing instruments include data sampling clocks that dictate the frequency with which the hearing instruments sample the wirelessly-transmitted audio signals. A common problem is that such data sampling clocks are not synchronized with the audio clock (or “source clock”) of the electronic device with which the hearing instrument is communicating. For example, a source clock generated by a mobile phone may not match a sampling clock that a hearing aid uses to sample music being wirelessly streamed from the mobile phone. This typically results in latency problems, and efforts to correct such asynchronous clocks result in unacceptably significant power consumption and space requirements.